


the heisenberg trick

by windingwoods



Series: never stood a fightin' chance [2]
Category: World Trigger (Anime & Manga)
Genre: Established Relationship, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Kid Fic, Multi, Polyamory, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-09
Updated: 2020-02-09
Packaged: 2021-02-28 05:08:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22638997
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/windingwoods/pseuds/windingwoods
Summary: “Say, Jin…” Reiji starts, standing in front of the door with the feeling someone’s just tossed his guts in a working washing machine. “Why does this kid look an awful lot like Yuri?”
Relationships: Jin Yuuichi/Kizaki Reiji, Kizaki Reiji/Rindou Yuri, mentioned arakou
Series: never stood a fightin' chance [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1628569
Comments: 2
Kudos: 14





	the heisenberg trick

**Author's Note:**

  * For [goldenlake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldenlake/gifts).



> behold!! the most nonsensical, self-indulgent mess i have ever created!!! in my defense i was asked to!!!!  
> anyway i hope yall like timelines, children and depression. for extra sadness please listen to "father daughter dance" by kesha while reading

“So,” Reiji says into his earpiece, “you’re sure something big is about to happen.”

Jin’s voice crackles with a barely concealed sigh. “One hundred percent.”

In the sleepy calm of a tuesday afternoon, Reiji surveys the park around him. There’s one old lady in the distance who seems to have dozed off into the sun. “... Here.”

“As I said, my side effect told me s—” 

Reiji muses that the reason Jin just trailed off must be the gaping, pitch black hole that’s opening in front of him as they speak. As he widens his stance, he wonders, not for the first time, what must it feel like to have foresight. 

There’s a small figure coming out of the gate and for one moment Reiji thinks it must be a new type of trion soldier, maybe designed to be fast and hard to hit; then he notices the bright red, velvet overalls. A child is running towards him, but he barely has the time to register the black, boxy thing she’s carrying in her arms before a second figure steps through the gate as it’s closing back. 

This one’s much taller, clad in dark clothes fit for combat, and they’re holding something akin to a big machete in their hand. When they see the child hiding behind Reiji’s legs they stop for a moment, as if confused. 

“You need to take the kid and run back to Tamakoma _right now_ ,” Jin says. He sounds strained, worried. “You won’t be pursued. Just don’t try to take him on by yourself.”

Because Reiji’s trusted Jin ever since they were kids trying to sneak out of school to go train with Mogami, he picks the child up with one arm and bolts in the direction of the Tamakoma HQ, keeping an eye on the enemy. Just as predicted, the person bolts in the opposite direction with a frustrated sound. 

Thankfully, the park is just a short distance from the river, so it’s a couple-minutes run back home praying the emblem on Reiji’s uniform will be enough for no one to report him to the authorities as a possible kidnapper. The drawback is that soon he has to put the child down and look at her face, which comes with an uncomfortable, quite impossible to avoid detail.

“Say, Jin…” Reiji starts, standing in front of the door with the feeling someone’s just tossed his guts in a working washing machine. “Why does this kid look an awful lot like Yuri?”

***

The child’s name is Aki and the first thing she does when she sets foot into Tamakoma like she’s been there countless times before is to yell, “Auntie Chika!” 

From where she’s sitting on the sofa with a book on her knees and Yuma and Izuho at each of her sides, Chika doesn’t really stand a chance against the brute force of Aki barreling into her lap. Because she’s far too polite for her own good, she merely smiles after the initial wheeze of surprise. “Do we know each other?”

“Yes!” Aki yells, as if the question itself offends her. Then she seems to realize something, or maybe remember something, and her eyes drift from Chika’s face, to the thing she’s still carrying, back to Chika’s face. “... No?”

From where he’s observing the whole scene with a raised brow, Yuma says, “Wasn’t lying the first time.” 

“Eh?” Both Chika and Izuho turn to him, one with vague distress and the other owl-like in her curiosity. 

There’s a strange, scared look in Aki’s eyes, so Reiji steps in. “First things first. I’ll go grab some snacks from the kitchen, you guys just— try to settle down.” 

He pretends not to notice Aki trailing behind him, but he still asks, “You okay with cheesecake?” 

A hum of confirmation is all he gets, so he grabs the fancy box from the fridge, hoping Konami won’t have his head over this emergency breach of code, and a few plates from the pantry.

Wanting to test something, he says, “Could you grab the forks for me?”

Without hesitation, Aki walks up to the drawer where they keep western-style cutlery and grabs a fistful of dessert forks from there. Now that he’s free to observe, he can tell the thing she’s keeping tucked against her chest looks like an old radio. 

By the time they’ve made their way back to the living room, Jin’s standing by the table with the awkward energy of someone at a party where they only know the host. Before Reiji can think of being touched by him hurrying back home, Yuma says, “I’m telling you, it’s got “romance” right in the title!” 

Izuho glares at him. “For the last time, ‘Romance of the Three Kingdoms’ is not a love story. We should’ve gotten some _manga_ instead, I bet the library selection wasn’t that bad.”

“Easy mistake to make,” Yuma mutters as Jin turns to Reiji. “Uh, hi. The younglings are having love troubles.” 

“Kou is having love troubles,” Yuma and Izuho correct him in unison, while Chika makes a face; she still adds, “Arafune asked him on a date.”

From where she’s hovering behind Reiji, Aki gasps. She runs to the coffee table in front of the sofa to put the forks down, then she looks at both her hands, old radio now trapped between her arm and her side. After a beat, he realizes she’s doing math on her fingers. 

“Fourteen years!” she exclaims, sounding like she’s just discovered the secrets of the universe. 

Reiji would ask her what she means by that, but his attention snaps back to Jin when he laughs. “I can’t believe Kou and Arafune getting together was, or, err, will be such a dramatic event you just used it to count back how many years in the past you are.” 

“I…” Aki starts, but whatever she wanted to say gets lost in the crash of something shattering on the floor. At the end of the staircase, with splashes of coffee on her legs, a broken mug at her feet and the color drained from her face, stands Yuri.

Belatedly, Reiji realizes he’s crushing the cheesecake box in his hands. 

***

The room had been oddly quiet as Aki explained her circumstances, stumbling as if instead of talking she was walking on a muddy road, jumping over each pond. Her voice had been too small when she called Yuri her mother, or when she described how the future she comes from holds nothing but devastating destruction for Border. 

“My dad, he turned into, well.” A pause, a glare Reiji could have sworn was sent in Jin’s direction. “This fiddly, old thing. It’s a time machine, I think.” 

Without giving them any time to properly digest the incoming end of their lives, she’d handed Yuri what looked like a USB drive with a stubborn scowl. “Here’s all the data we had on them. You said this would help… you. Prepare.” 

Yuri is standing in the middle of the kitchen with a similar scowl now. Reiji’s put on the playlist he knows she loves as he washes the dishes they’ve used for dinner. Needless to say, it was an awkward one. 

“Hey,” Yuri says, with the kind of voice that demands Reiji to turn and look at her. “Dance with me?”

Before, he would’ve balked at the request, a flustered face the only thing to show how deeply he’d love to. Now, though, he quiets the nervous energy in himself by wiping his hands with the dishcloth. 

He puts them at Yuri’s waist and she wraps her own arms around him. It’s not the most comfortable position, but they start swaying in slow, small circles anyway. 

“We have to keep her hidden,” Yuri starts. Reiji knows she’s making herself consider the course of action to take so that she can feel steadier later, when it’s time to confront the rest. “Kido can’t know about this yet, it would haunt him worse than that scar does.”

“The kids know to keep it under wraps,” he offers after an affirmative hum. “It’s the neighbor on the loose that worries me.”

Yuri’s fingers rub up and down his shirt in time with the music. “Jin says he’s wary of his side effect, that’s why he didn’t follow you when he realized how close Tamakoma was. We’ll have to catch him when our elite’s not here.”

The sliver of humor in her tone is comforting, but it’s gone soon. Her grip tightens and Reiji knows she’s run out of strategy talk for the moment. 

“She has your eyes,” is all she says. 

He’d noticed too, the very first time Aki looked up at him with nothing but terror on her face. Truth be told, he doesn’t know how to feel about it just yet. “At least it’s not my nose.”

That gets a snort out of Yuri, which he counts as a silver lining in the murky sky of discovering their future parenthood and its likely violent end. 

“... You know why I like being an engineer better than an operator?” She sounds small, wet with the grief that’s constantly leaking through all the cracks of whatever place she’s stuffed it into. When he doesn’t dare to respond, she says, “Engineers don’t have to take care of anyone. Not directly, at least.” 

Her nails are clipped short, but he can still feel them dig into the skin of his back. “I just can’t— see a future where I have a child and I’m not _constantly_ seeing their faces. I can’t do it.”

It’d be easy to say nothing in the face of that, Reiji knows she wouldn’t hold it against him, but that’s never been an option for him. So he untangles her arms from him, gently, and he brushes a strand of hair from her face. Her ponytail’s gotten lower and messy after a full day. 

“It’s not going to happen now,” he says. Yuri doesn’t cry, because Yuri hasn’t cried in front of people in almost six years, but she smiles the way she does every time they visit the graves. “We have… time. To make peace. And if by then you still feel like you can’t, you won’t. Aki might still be off living in some other timeline anyway.”

The telltale sign of scientific curiosity passes through Yuri’s eyes for a moment, but Reiji guesses she’s shelved for some other time when she raises to her toes, pressing her lips to his. 

***

Jin’s been curled up in one of the corners of the sofa for an amount of time that’s starting to edge towards worrying. Reiji wonders if he’s got an internal clock ticking down towards the moment he decides to approach him, then he decides wondering about something like that is pointless. 

“Figured out the secrets of the universe yet?” he asks, sitting next to him. 

Jin gives him an unamused look, the kind he usually reserves for any Tachikawa-related interaction, but he stops just short of whatever mildly sarcastic remark was on his mind when Aki walks up towards them.

She’s wearing some old pyjamas that used to belong to Konami and she’s got a toothbrush in the hand she’s not holding the black trigger with. Her knees sink into the fabric as she clambers onto the sofa in the small space between the two of them and for a fleeting, sharp second Reiji could swear he’s a teenager again and the real Konami is sitting there, demanding a bedtime story. 

Then Aki throws her arms (a child’s arms, they can’t quite reach all the way) around him and squeezes, mumbling her goodnight with her nose pressed against his sternum. She turns to do the same to Jin and all Reiji can think about as she curls close to him and Jin’s face goes pale is the way the old radio was digging into his back. 

“Don’t stay up too late,” she mumbles sleepily, eyes kept on the ground in between her bare feet, “the both of you.”

After she’s disappeared upstairs, Reiji turns. “I was trying to figure out how to tell you, but I think you’re the one who’s actually known for the longest time.” 

He thinks there’s something bittersweet in the way Jin avoids his gaze just like Aki did when he says, “Having weird, foggy visions of a future where I have a kid is not the same as seeing her right in front of me.” 

“I guess not,” is all Reiji has to offer. He tries to find something else, anything to unspool the tangle of limbs and dread next to him, but it’s Jin who eventually leans into his side. 

“I think she’s terrified of saying the wrong thing,” he murmurs into Reiji’s shoulder. “Time is… delicate. One word too many and she could erase everything she knows.”

“That’s why you’re so cagey too?” 

Instead of answering his question, Jin shrugs. “She’s so young she probably only understand there’s a box somewhere with a cat that’s gonna croak in it. That’s how I used to think about it at first.”

Once again, Reiji thinks of the old radio. It’s such an odd black trigger, yet it fits the kind of person Jin is. 

As if sensing what he’s thinking, Jin says, “Aki said she went as far back as she could, so fourteen years.” The brief silence that follows that feels like ice in Reiji’s stomach. “The war was—”

“No.” His own voice rings distant in his ears, drowned out by the anger, the fear tearing him from the inside out. He thinks he’s gripping Jin by the shoulders, maybe. “I’m not letting you do this to yourself, nor to the rest of us. One time’s more than enough.”

There’s an odd look on Jin’s face, like a familiar detail from a memory he’s forgotten, and Reiji realizes it’s the same expression he’d made when he scooped Fujin out the rubble of the battlefield. Grief-stricken, twisted, dusty from years of performative smiles. 

There’s no music awkwardly filling in the gaps this time, but Jin seems to relax by a fraction still when Reiji shifts his grip on him into a hug. He’s another one who hasn’t cried in too long and Reiji wonders, as Jin lets his head rest against him, what’s more delicate between him and time. 

***

Exactly like Jin predicted, the guy makes his move once he has to leave Tamakoma after a call from Kido. He’s a black trigger user, Aki told them with something taut about her voice, but the USB drive has a pretty detailed dossier on his weapon, strategies and possible weak spots. Reiji wondered if he helped compile it, watching his friends die one after the other. 

He’d shelved that thought after one of the walls of the living room exploded in a cloud of flying debris, but it’s back scratching at the back of his mind now that he’s looking down at a disarmed man, tied up and in his regular body. His machete is stuck half-buried in their TV. 

“So much for keeping this under wraps,” Hyuse says. He’s still in his trion body and he’s missing one of his arms from the elbow down. 

“We only need to keep Kido out of it until Aki’s gone, we were going to need support from HQ afterwards from the start,” Yuri counters. Aki herself is standing behind her, head poking out, and all Reiji wants to do is to get her far away from a battle scene. The fact that she must have seen worse in her eight years of life is the opposite of comforting.

In the terse silence, a beeping sound goes off; it takes a beat for anyone to realize it’s coming from the radio in Aki’s hands. “Oh,” she says, quietly, “guess the cool down’s over.”

Her eyes search for Yuri’s, as if for confirmation. It strikes Reiji that the child in front of him doesn’t even know if she still has a home somewhere in the future. Yuri’s been theorizing about it with Cronin and Jin, but he doesn’t think any of them has any idea. 

Still, Yuri’s voice is even when she crouches down and cups Aki’s face in her hands. “You’ll see us all again in a heartbeat, then.”

Jin, ever the talented elite, chooses that moment to waltz back into the wreckage of their home like none of it is out of the ordinary. Belatedly, Reiji realizes someone moved all the valuables in the part of the building that’s not been destroyed.

“Ready to go, kiddo?” Jin asks. That, too, comes out too natural. Aki nods, a little steadier, and she hops to where the rest of them are, followed by Yuri. 

Reiji watches her going around, wrapping everyone in a hug as sweeping as a small child can manage, until she gets to him. He gets down on one knee and she runs her hand on a cut on his cheek, trying to smoothe over the trion leaking from the wound. 

He knows Jin’s standing right behind him, so he grabs for him and brings him down at their level, winking at Aki when Jin yelps and staggers. One look and Yuri’s joining them too, sitting down with her skirt folded neatly around her and a smile that for once holds true warmth. 

Aki’s eyes are lucid, but she’s Yuri’s and Jin’s daughter so she stays quiet as she turns the knobs on the radio. It beeps softly back at her, almost in a comforting rhythm, and Reiji bumps his shoulder into Jin’s when he hears him suck in a sharp breath. 

Aki’s also Reiji’s daughter, though, so, as the gaping portal opens behind her, she raises her head and fixes the three of them with a stern look. “You all better not fool around in these fourteen years,” she says. “‘Cause I’ll be there to give you an earful if you do.”

Then, just like she came, she’s out, her hand disappearing last as it’s still waving goodbye.

By Reiji’s side, Yuri deflates with a sigh that’s halfway to being a laugh. “Guess we’ve got to get to work.” 


End file.
